The Medea Hypothesis

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Steven Shaviro's blog has a really interesting post up right now about Peter Ward's new book.

Ward’s book is a critique of the quite popular Gaia Hypothesis, originally developed by James Lovelock, which claims that the Earth as a whole, with all its biomass, constitutes an emergent order, a self-organizing system, that maintains the whole planet — its climate, the chemical constitution of the atmosphere and the seas, etc. — in a state that is favorable to the continued flourishing of life. Essentially the Gaia Hypothesis sees the world as a system in homeostatic equilibrium — in much the same ways that individual cells or organisms are self-maintaining, homeostatic systems. Gaia is cybernetically, or autopoietically, self-regulating system: continual feedback, among organisms and their environments, keeps the air temperature, the salinity of the sea, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, etc., within the limits that are necessary for the continued flourishing of life.

Ward’s Medea Hypothesis directly contests all these claims. According to Ward, the ecosphere is not homeostatic or self-regulating; to the contrary, it is continually being driven by positive feedback mechanisms to unsustainable extremes. Most of the mass extinction events in the fossil record, Ward says, were caused by out-of-control life processes — rather than by an external interruption of such processes, such as the giant meteor hit which supposedly led to the extinction of the dinosaurs at the end of the Mesozoic. The great Permian extinction, for instance — the most catastrophic of which we have knowledge, in which 90% of all species, and 99% of all living beings, were destroyed — was caused by “blooms of sulfur bacteria in the seas,” which flourished due to greenhouse heating and poisoned the oceans and the atmospheres with increased concentrations of hydrogen sulfide, which is extremely toxic.

More generally, Ward claims that life processes have destabilizing effects, rather than homeostatic ones, upon the very environment that they rely upon for survival. This is largely because of the Malthusian basis of natural selection. Traits that give any organism a selective advantage over its rivals will spread through the gene pool, unless and until they overwhelm the environment and reach the limits of its carrying capacity. An organism that is too successful will ultimately suffer a crash from overpopulation, depletion of resources, and so on. The success of sulfur bacteria means the poisoning of all other organisms; or, to give another example, the rise of photosynthetic organisms 2 billion years ago poisoned and killed the then-dominant anaerobic microbes that had composed the overwhelming majority of life-forms up to that time.

This leads Shaviro to a critique of the current reliance on a metaphysics of "emergence", which informs our politics via an emphasis on "self-organization" and its outcomes. While I agree with him that most of the existing forms self-organization takes are tired and boring and really running out of rhetorical-political fuel at this point, it seems that what we might actually need to give up is our need for a sense of permanence, our misguided humanisms, and our pretense to (large, global, unsustainable) "great" societies and civilizations.

Anybody actually read Ward yet?
 
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mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
Steven Shaviro's blog has a really interesting post up right now about Peter Ward's new book.



This leads Shaviro to a critique of the current reliance on a metaphysics of "emergence", which informs our politics via an emphasis on "self-organization" and its outcomes. While I agree with him that most of the existing forms self-organization takes are tired and boring and really running out of rhetorical-political fuel at this point, it seems that what we might actually need to give up is our need for a sense of permanence, our misguided humanisms, and our pretense to (large, global, unsustainable) "great" societies and civilizations.

Anybody actually read Ward yet?

That's interesting, I've been reading around those ideas recently but not read Ward. There's a few biologists I think whose ideas he'll be following - Charles Elton, John Terborgh, Raymond Lindemann; it's the idea of keystone species and when they're eradicated (i.e alpha predators - lion, polar bear), the surrounding ecology collapses, causing a predominance of (sulphur bacteria, starfish, whatever) which pollute the surrounds as opposed to generating an ecology.

I'm glad someone's finally rubbished all that hippie shite. I never bought the Gaia crap for a minute.
 

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
See also a paper called 'Community, Structure, Population Control and Competition' by Hairston, Smith and Slobodkin from the 60s.
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
That's interesting, I've been reading around those ideas recently but not read Ward. There's a few biologists I think whose ideas he'll be following - Charles Elton, John Terborgh, Raymond Lindemann; it's the idea of keystone species and when they're eradicated (i.e alpha predators - lion, polar bear), the surrounding ecology collapses, causing a predominance of (sulphur bacteria, starfish, whatever) which pollute the surrounds as opposed to generating an ecology.

I'm glad someone's finally rubbished all that hippie shite. I never bought the Gaia crap for a minute.

Agreed! Will check out those authors you mention.

It's strange, I never did buy Gaia either, and I always wondered why some systems seem to have these very tidy emergent properties but the higher up you go in order of complexity the more chaotic it all gets.

The imperatives of action under chaos might entail firm and brave decision-making, but I'm not sure that makes for an amazingly sound ethos.
 
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mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
The language used is really great, they start talking about 'trophic cascades' and 'keystone mutualists' and use mathematical formulae, I think you'd like Mary E. Power actually, who's more recent, and also John Terborgh.

I only know this cos I was literally reading about them today, it's obviously in the ether.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
This sounds interesting. We could certainly do with a counterblast to the ludicrous notion that "nature" (meaning, the global ecosystem, minus humans) is inherently stable or 'harmonious', until naughty old Man comes along and throws everything into chaos.

There has always been extinction, chaos and climate change. The only real difference I see this time is that the species currently responsible for most of the change is consciously aware of this process, and able to understand that its current actions are detrimental to (many of) its members' survival.
 
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